It is still early days and the next stage of the research will be to perform experiments using human rather than mouse tissues.

“If only I had saved my T-cells from back then, when I was on the hospital bed I should have been saying ‘save some of that blood for me’,” she said while musing on a missed opportunity for an experiment.

But even with treatments still on the horizon, the findings ask interesting questions about multiple sclerosis itself.

Why does the repair process get worse with time? Does the disease become more severe and the repair process cannot keep up? Or does age make the repair less efficient?

These will also be considered in the next stage of the research.

Fellow researcher Dr Yvonne Dombrowski added: “This knowledge is essential to designing future treatments that tackle neurological diseases, such as MS, in a new way – repairing damage rather than only reducing attacks.

“In the future, combining these approaches will deliver better outcomes for patients.”

Dr Sorrel Bickley, the head of biomedical research at the MS Society, said: “This exciting study gives us an important understanding of how myelin repair can be promoted, which could open up new areas for treatment development.”